Web-based Learning Solutions for Communities of Practice

Conditions and Key Success Factors for the Management of Communities of Practice
or as a pilot project in order to assess staff reaction
(Indiana University); and in others, such as
Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, CoP are created and
their staff is forced to become a part of them. In
this last case, both the spontaneity of creation of
communities and the voluntary participation of
their members comes into question, which may
justify why they should probably be referred to
by another name. However, the implementation
of these community forms has been a success for
the company, since it has achieved the objectives
originally set. So is it really indispensable for the
creation of communities to be spontaneous and
led by members?
It is also true that any change today (especially
in small and medium-sized enterprises) towards
knowledge management or towards the creation
of value-based on individual competencies entails
important organization restructuring (as can be
seen in the case of the Basque Country automotive
company). Communities of practice can facilitate
these goals as they are based on the transfer of
knowledge in order to create value. So, even if
CoPs are promoted, it’s important to consider that
achieving success requires respecting the identity
basis, generating the truth between members
and considering also the individual goals. This
is in line with what Thompson (2005), based on
a single case study, identified as the distinction
between a Seeding and a Controlling Structure.
In the case in which communities are formed due
to an organizational initiative and attendance is
mandatory, it would most likely evolve to some
other knowledge mechanism, possibly more focused
to transferring explicit knowledge, which
can be interesting in order to save costs, mostly at
the beginning, but does not yield the results that a
community sharing tacit knowledge yields.
Can Communities of Practice be
Structurally Designed?
Following along the lines of the previous argumentation,
there is another controversy that is
important to clarify. According to CoP’s theoretical
background, communities of practice are
not units that can be designed – in this context
design is understood as a systematic, planned,
and reflexive colonization of time and space in
the service of a task, while it may not only include
the production of artifacts, but also the design of
social processes such as organizations or education.
Authors reiterate in any discussion on the
design of learning—which cannot be designed
because it belongs to the environment of experience
and practice—that communities of practice
have already existed for a long time and are not
a new fashion in design or a type of pedagogical
organization or device to be implemented. Communities
are about content, about learning as a
live experience of negotiating meaning, not about
forms. Therefore, they can be recognized, encouraged,
supported, and nourished, but not designed.
Learning cannot be designed either, it can only
be facilitated or thwarted.
The important and critical fact for our management-based
perspective is that infrastructures,
systems, resources, and connections can be chosen
and reinforced in order to nourish communities
of practice. As a matter of fact, the reflection on
which type of community could be interesting at
an organizational level through the dimensions
studied in this research encourages organizations
to create communities of practice, but not to design
them. However, it is possible for an organization
to understand the type of communication needed
at an organizational level, the type of community
that can make an impression on potential members,
and the type of knowledge that must be shared
in everyday work. With this information, the
organization in question should have the ability
to develop communities.
In short, the process of developing communities
of practice is closer to agriculture (cultivation)
than to architecture (design). Nevertheless,
based on the experiences analyzed previously, it
would seem that the role of organizations is to
be sensitive to the importance of the communi-
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